something touches the heart, doesn't it? It's to the Lord and it moves people. It moved me to hear that beautiful song. I'm about to preach to you a sermon that is not particularly orthodox. It's not standard, what you would say standard approach to preaching is. At first, I suspect it's going to seem a little light and a little frivolous, maybe. A little fun, Our prayer and hope is that before long it morphs into a penetrating liniment into your heart and that you won't be able to get away from it. It's sobering. I want this message to cling to your heart like the tire baby so that you can't turn it loose very easily. You don't want to get it out of your heart. Even if you tried, you couldn't. The title of this message is Your Bible Mirror. I thought to call this sermon your Bible picture, but that's not capturing the idea. You know, a picture is a look at you frozen in time. That's how you were when you were 20 or 30 or 60 or 70. But a mirror reflects you wherever you are all the time. So that you can look at it today and you may not see what you saw 20 years ago to your chagrin. I like it much today. Today I brought with me two mirrors to church. Two mirrors here to the pulpit. And one of these mirrors is this one right here. I suspect all of you ladies have one of one size or shape like this somewhere in your house. I would even venture to say you probably have several of them. Maybe even one in your wallet, one of those you can open up your wallet and make sure the lipstick is not smeared. You know, all the things are just right. And maybe and probably you have a full length mirror somewhere in your home where you can kind of sidle up there and you can see the top to the toe and all in between because you want to make sure you look okay. as best you possibly can. So we have a mirror here, and the Bible talks about this kind of mirror in our text passage, which is in James. I think it would be wise for me to read in your hearing these verses. 23, James chapter 1, if any man be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is likened to a man beholding his natural face in a glass, the outside, the natural part, in a glass, and that's what this is, so we're looking here in the Bible at the biblical description, to some degree at least, of a mirror, a physical mirror. And the next verse says, for he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way. and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was. How easy it is to forget who you really are, how you really look, isn't it? I mean you can do that with your natural body, you get rest in the morning, you go out and you don't think maybe too much about it until it's lunch or you're going to see some special person and you want to look in another mirror. That's when you grab the one in your purse. Take a little quick look. And next verse, 25, but whoso looketh into the perfect law of liberty and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed." And there's the second mirror, the perfect law of liberty. Here is this mirror, I'm holding it, this one in my left hand, and the natural mirror in my right hand. So I want to talk about the one that's a glass that the Bible calls, this mirror that's called a glass that a man looks in, beholdeth himself. Because this one, as I've hinted already, it reveals the outside of you. How your skin looks if you're getting too fat. You probably don't like the flab that's under you right here, especially you older people. And I see several in here. By the way, younger people, if you keep on living, you're gonna get one of these little things here. What do you got, a chin tuck? And when you look in a mirror like I am, you're not looking so much at the gray hair, you're looking at the no hair. I mean, the fact like this, you know, right here. However, I take care of it like I had 20,000 of them. Probably got only 5,000. So you look at yourself and it tells you Probably some stuff you won't like. It's not that you're just pretty and got those nice dimples and all of that good stuff, but this mirror's gonna tell you, you need to lay off of that spoon, buddy. You're eating too much, you got too big a tummy. You got a big old bulge out here in the front and you're not pregnant. I mean, it's just the way it is. You're just obese. Oh boy. I've known a lot of people through the years, but I've never liked I've known many people that like for you to tell them the truth about how they look. They just rather, here lies, you know, speaking to me smooth things. Tell me I'm 20 again. Tell me I'm a best looking kid in the block. I mean, just lie to me about it. That's the way most people are. But the mirror. We look in the mirror so we can see our ears and our eyes and our nose and the zits. Especially teenagers, they are more concerned about the zits than they are about the gray. They have more problem with that in that particular stage in life. So we have mirrors and the mirrors are tattletales. They not only tell us how we really are, but they also keep us from embarrassing ourselves some, and it's pretty easy to do. I mean, who wants to walk out of the house and go to church or to work or anywhere with one of those little snotty butt things holding down out of your nose? That would just kill me. Some of us in this room know of a special person in our life who many, many years ago was a church pianist at a sister church, and it just had Kind of like this one, an aisle down the middle and two on the sides. And this girl who played the piano went to the ladies room, which was in the back. And she came out of there and she didn't have no full-length mirror around. And she didn't realize that somehow she had her skirt tucked in her underclothes and she walked all the way down the center aisle. And her mother was right behind, tada, girl. Isn't that the embarrassing story you ever heard? Just can't imagine. And so we have mirrors to try and protect us from mistakes so that people don't take advantage and see us in the wrong light. And we do everything we can to make ourselves look really better. That's all about Mary Kay. That's what she's about, that stuff. You make yourself look better than you really are. Put it on here. And the mirror says you need a little more right here. And you've got a little brown spot there and you need to cover it. It just tells us how to take care of the body. And we know that's important because we want to look our best all the time. We want to look our best. So I thank God for a natural glass, the one that James is talking about here, that we behold on a wall or in our hand or somewhere that enables us to see where we are at any given time and just check out our lipstick or just check out our smile or check out whatever it is on the outside that we want to see and deal with the problem. But then this mirror, this one here, looks on the inside. Yeah, it's the mirror of God to help you see what you are down here inside where people outside, even this mirror, can't see. Yeah, this Bible mirror, that's what I call it, your Bible mirror, this Bible mirror here is a spiritual mirror which helps you see the inside troubles, the inside strengths and weaknesses that are in your own self. The Bible is to your true character what this mirror is to your face and to the rest of you. And here's where it gets a little bit stickier, you know, because this book is talking about you and always helping you to see who you are. And it does it in several ways. One of the ways this book does it is that you're reading in here and it's telling you about character, your character. You're reading, for example, in the book of Proverbs which says, "'The wicked flee when no man pursueth.'" Watch that, 27, verse 1. And you watch, you're sitting there doing, you're thinking, he's talking about me. I got a speeding ticket down there and now I'm back on the road again and I think everybody that sees me is saying, you dummy, you got a speeding ticket. Ha ha! We just thinking of it. Ain't it funny how things hang around we realize that we're being revealed. We're seeing scriptures about honesty. And our heart is telling us, you're not honest in some ways. You weren't honest on your income tax. You weren't honest when you were describing what happened between you and a friend that broke up with each other. You're making yourself look better. You're doing what they do on the television every night on the news. You're distorting things, distorting things with a purpose to make yourself look better than you really are. And here's the Bible that's revealing you and pointing out how you're not honest and telling you about hot tempers. and you're realizing I have one, and it's not too far under the surface, and if somebody pushes my button just right, they'll hear from me. So I'm really being talked about. The Bible is exposing my temper, and the Bible is exposing my greed. I want more. The Lord has provided enough resources for me to live, but I'm still hungry for money, and still hungry for more possessions and compliments. And boy, I'll tell you where it really reveals us. I mean, this Bible mirror you're looking in here, when it starts talking about selfishness, oh gosh. Selfishness, how that we're always seem like wanting to put ourselves in the better position. Even at somebody's expense, the expense of our children or expense of our parents or our mates, we're just And so the Bible does. Did you realize that the book of Proverbs here, this is a whole book of character. And you'll find roughly nearly every kind of character you can think of from a fool to a wise man to a harlot to a person who's holy and good. I mean you find it right in here in the Bible including laziness. Especially there's a lot in here about lazy people. And you can go to the Proverbs and it's just like taking The spiritual mirror had opened it up, but it's not stopping with your teeth and your tongue and your chin. This book is looking down into the fabric of your soul and calling you out and showing you where you are. But a wonderful thing about this book is it not only shows you where you are at any given time, it helps you to see how other people are looking at you. I know man looketh on the outward appearance, but I also know that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. So when people hear you talk and they see your reactions to especially pressured situations, they get a look at you on the inside too, a little glimpse of what's in your heart, what's going on, what's really driving you, what your motives are. You stand at the water fountain or somewhere else, and you tell dirty jokes, somebody checks your computer and they find you've been on pornographic websites, it's a revelation, isn't it? It's people seeing into you as to who you really are. And we have a tendency, all of us have a tendency to think different than other people think about us. We think maybe we can walk on water, but they don't think so. We think we got it all under control, but they're not thinking so. And if you're honest, looking in here, and this is exactly what James says do in chapter one, just read it. looking into the perfect law of liberty, when you're looking in here, which we're exhorted to do, for a purpose that we might see where we are, and we might see what needs correcting. We might see where the bald spots are, and the gray spots are, and the brown spots are, and all these things that in our hearts are not to be there. We're greedy and jealous and hot-tempered and hard and selfish, and we step on other people, and we're not peacemakers, and these are revealed to us by the character in the Bible. The character that's telling us about us, that's telling us what other people are seeing, and what needs to be addressed for our own good. Because always, the Bible directs us to the cure for our own good. Bible doesn't want us to stay where we are. I hear people say, well, that's just who I am. People have to set me for just who I am. That is a cop out. That may be who you are, but you don't have to stay where you are. The grace of God can change lives. We preach about it, we talk about it, we see it in the book, how that God is interested in helping us to overcome our weaknesses and helping us to grow in grace. And yet we sometimes say, well, they'll just have to set me like I am. Don't denigrate your own self by saying something that stupid. It says you don't believe in the grace of God. You're not going to let God change your life. And I'll tell you, I'm not looking in the mirror or around in this room anywhere at any person who doesn't need some change for the better. You know it. I may not know and probably don't know. And it's good that I don't know all about where you really are, but you know a good deal about it. and God knows all about it, and God wants you to be better than you are. He wants you, if you're not saved, to become a Christian, and He knows whether you are or not. And He wants you, if you are saved, to grow up. If you're still a babe when you're 30, He don't want you to stay in diapers, He wants you to grow up and become a teenager, and then into adolescence. grow up to maturity and he wants you to be fruitful in multiple lives, a house of spiritual children in your life. That's the plan of the God of heaven and he sees you and he's always, always revealing you and encouraging you at the same time. You need to pray more. You need to be in church. You need to be in the word. You need to learn how to give. You need to learn how to forgive. You need to learn how to work in a team effort and be a cooperative spirit and learn teamwork in your life, things that most of us are pretty void of, the Bible will show it to us, but it will also show us what to do about it. And by the way, not only does this book show you who you are in terms of character and what's really right and what's really wrong, what's really good and what's really bad, This book also will have somebody just like you in it. You read in this book and keep on looking, and you're going to find a Bob Thomas, and a Chris Moore, and a Margaret Hudson. Find yourself. It's one of God's ways in His mirror of showing you who you are. You find you in there. You may find you, if you're a man, in a lady, in terms of how you are. And lady, you may find yourself in a man. But there is a twin for you in here, who thinks like you, who's acted like you, who's behaved like you're behaving. Your Bible mirror helps you see yourself by seeing somebody just like you, right here. And if you'll spend some time looking at your counterpart in the Bible. You're going to wake up to a lot of what you are and who you are, but not just who you are, but where you're headed. Because we have the wonderful benefit of looking at people in the Bible and seeing their character or lack thereof, how they behaved under given circumstances, and seeing where it put them. Looking down the road of They started here, they did this, and here's where they ended. That's you. If you act like them and stay like they stayed if they didn't turn to God and get it right, then you're going to end up where they ended up, and it's not going to be a good place. I think a good and classic example is that of the prodigal son. Most everybody in this room and those who are watching know about him, goodness he was born to a wonderful dad and he had a good family, a good substance, I mean his needs were being met at home. But gosh wasn't he impatient. And I know what you just said, I wish you hadn't brought that up. If there's anybody in here that is not impatient, I'd like to meet you after church and find out how you conquered impatience. I had a little work to do on my foot, and I just can't wait till it gets well. I'm just so impatient. And that's just one way. There are a lot of other ways. This fellow was impatient. Give me that portion of goods, Dad. I can't wait till you die and for the will to be read. I want it now. Give it to me. And he had the modern idea of lots of people. You owe it to me, Dad. It's already mine. Really wasn't, but he argued that way. So he took that portion of goods, which would have rightly come to him in the proper timing. And he went his way to do his thing. Does he sound like anybody, you know, I want to do it my way. I want to do my thing. I don't need God interfering in my life. Are you mom? Are you dad? I'm going to do things my way because it's my right to do things my way. Just how he thought. You know what you call a person like that? A master. A homemade, self-made master of his or her own life. And they come in male and female varieties. I want to do it my way, so he took the money, he took the goods, and he went out, and boy did he ever have a party. And another party, and another party, and he was too thick between the ears to realize that people will come to your parties and they'll pat you on the back as long as you're paying the tab. And you're the life of the party. You're providing the subs and all that go along. Boy, he went out there and all of that inheritance, he took in his own hands and did it his way, and wasted it on fun and games, thinking, boy, that is what I need, fun. I want to have a great time. So he wasted his substance and riotous living, and found himself in a position where all of his fairweather friends were gone. They'll leave you. The buddies who would just lay their life down for you. I love you. That guy, if you'll have sex with me tonight, I'll love you forever. We'll forget you tomorrow. So will the girl. This old boy found himself in a position and no man gave it to him. And the position he was in wasn't glamorous. He was a Jew. And the scourge of the Jews are hogs. No bacon in our breakfast, none of that stuff. And this boy found himself in, of all places, a hog pen. I grew up in the country. Tommy Minshew back there knows something about hog pens. We usually, in my home, had three, four hogs. Usually they were little pigs in the spring, but by about October, November, and the good cold spell came, they'd grown up to be 200 or 300 pounds, sometimes bigger hogs. And those hogs were in there for the purpose of being killed in the fall to provide bacon and ham and all that stuff for us. And you know what we fed them? They called it slop. I mean, it was when you eat and you got stuff to throw away, a little food, you put it in here and we take it out to the hogs. And after a while, dad would get some corn, soak it in water for three or four days. And by the way, when you do that, You can't get real close to it without closing your nose, because it stinks really bad. And we fed it to the hogs. And if you've been in a hog pen, they love to lie in mud. And they will just wallow. And when you go in the hog pen, they're like a lot of people that I've seen around our society, that when they get rid of a McDonald's box or something they drank or some of their trash, they just open the door and throw it out on the parking lot. Hogs are that way. They just live in their own squalor, their own poop. I'm telling you it's a bad place to be and you stink in a hog pen. There's nothing I know of that stinks much worse than a hog pen. And the prodigal son was in the hog pen. I'm talking about where it goes. I'm talking about connecting the dots between being your own boss and leaving God out of your equation and doing it your way. This guy went to the hog pen and there are a lot of people, there are a lot of other prodigal sons and daughters who followed his path and still are today. But when you go to this Bible mirror and you look at a story like that, it smites you and you say, gosh, I don't like this pimple right here. I need to put some more color on my hair here. I'm a lady, I don't want to be gray. You just don't like it. But this will tell you what to do. This will tell you what he did. He came to the hog pen and he came to himself. It's so hard for me to understand why too many people wait so long to come to themselves. Wake up! He came to himself and he said, how many servants, he wasn't one, you know, he used to be, but now he'd become a master. How many hard servants in my father's house have bread enough and to spare? And I perished with hunger in his hog pen. So what am I gonna do about it? Grat? Blame the government? Blame mom and dad? What am I gonna do about where I am? He said, I will arise and go to my father and say, father, I have sinned, oh that's hard to admit, isn't it? And done this evil in your sight. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me a servant. You see that transformation? He was a master. And now he says, I want to just be a servant. That's what every one of us ought to be. Humble, a servant, willing to give it to the Lord, follow the orders of our great God. and he rose, he didn't just think about it, he arose and came, he got up and did something about his intention. No need for you to just sit around and think about it, do something about where you are. Listen to the instructions, listen to the corrective information that's given in this book. He got up and he came to his father, and the father restored him. I mean, he put him in the house, he put him at the table, they killed a fatted calf, they had a party that's a good party, They just had a wonderful time. You know what he's a picture of? He's a picture of lots of people. And when you look into the Bible mirror, you see people like him. And you see where I am and where I'm headed. And you see what I need to do. I need to change my thinking. I need to get up and I need to go home. I need to humble myself to God before him and do what's right. And what medicine it is. And you find yourself in a person. Maybe a person like the prodigal son. Maybe a person like David. Maybe a person like Rahab the harlot. Maybe a person like Simon Peter, who had a way too big a mouth for too many times. Somebody in there. You will do yourself a favor to look in this mirror till you find you, and then say, let me follow through. He's just like me, I'm just like him or her. and I want to see where that's going, and I want to change. And even if that person didn't change, you can change and be different than that. You don't have to stay where you are. We sing a song, just as I am, without one plea. But that's thy blood we shed for me. Just as I am, I come. That's what God wants, just like you are. He won't leave you where you are. He'll change you. He'll start cleaning you up and making somebody different out of you. But you've got to start down here at the bottom until you bottom out. You're not going to see things different as long as you're holding on and justifying where you are. You're going to stay where you are, and chances are it's going to get worse. And if you think your life can't get worse, just hang on. It can. There's another story in this book I want you to hear as we close the service. It's in the book of Acts, by the way, and it's in the 22nd chapter. But I'm going to summarize it. There was a preacher, his name was Paul, you know about him. He was in prison, not because he had done wrong, but because he stood up for right and preached the Word of God. He would not be bent by pressures around him of people who didn't believe God and didn't want God. He just stood up. It eventually cost him his neck, his life. And this Apostle has been arrested in Jerusalem, Israel in the courtyard where the temple was. The Antonia Fortress is right here to the north and they're down here and he's praying and some of the Jews they don't like his message because he's preaching Christ and they don't want that. So they jump on him and the soldiers of the governor from the Antonio Fortress ran down horses and rescued him and took him out of there. And when he explained it, I'm a Roman citizen, they said, hey, we need to protect this man. They took him by horses about 65 miles overland to a place on the coast of Israel called Caesarea. He stayed there for two years. While he's there, he got a chance to explain himself, to speak up. And when he spoke up, he said, I'm innocent, but I didn't, I'm not here to tell you I'm innocent. I'm said to be guilty because I'm preaching Christ. And he took the opportunities to tell the gospel of Jesus Christ. There are always opportunities, just look around. Finally, there came a day when one of the governors under the Caesar heard about him, came there, Agrippa, that was his name. And when he heard Paul, Paul did his faithful, usual thing. He told Agrippa why he was under condemnation. I've preached the message that Moses and the prophets preached. I've preached Christ who died in Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans and Jews. I'm telling you, he's alive today, Agrippa. And he pled with Agrippa. You know you need him. You know you're lost. You know you need this Jesus I'm preaching. Come to him, please. Trust Jesus as your personal savior. And Agrippa heard the message. You know what he said? thou persuadest me to be a Christian. Go thy way for now, for in some other convenient, more convenient time I'll call on you. There's no record that he ever called. If Agrippa didn't come in his heart to know Christ, he is in eternal separation from God today in the lake of fire. The opportunity right there when he could have changed things. He could have listened to the message and accepted it and trusted Christ in his heart. But for whatever his reasons, he decided to wait. He's such a picture of people today. People who decide to wait. People who know they're Christians. They've trusted Christ. They've done that. But they're not living right and they know it. there's too much wondering, too much of the world and not enough of Christ in their lives. Not faithful to read the Word of God, not faithful to pray, not faithful to bring people to Jesus Christ, not faithful to church, not faithful to anything that's really just sort of toying with Christianity. And they know they ought to get up, God. They know they ought to change that, and get committed, I'm going to be a part of this, I want to make it happen, I want to see it. I want to see the work of God prosper and I don't want to be a bystander, I want to be an involved player. Maybe people who are like Agrippa. He was a good man, you know that history talks about him. He was a fair-minded man. He wasn't like a lot of those guys, they weren't fair-minded, but this guy was one of those fair-minded fellas. He's willing to listen to Paul's case. And yet he's heard all the religious stuff and he's still lost and on his way to Hell. He may be like some of you, some of you who are listening and watching. You've heard the story, but somehow you never, like the prodigal son, got up and did something about it, you just thought about it. Going to do this one of these days, going to take care of this one of these days, I'm going to get in church, I'm going to get saved, I'm going to get baptized, yeah. But Agrippa waited and waited and waited until he ran out of time. That's all Satan's gambling on, that you will wait too long and you will leave here because he knows you're going to. You will leave this world unprepared. As a Christian, unprepared to meet the Lord in the sense that you've wasted your life that He gave you and you never got hooked up and said, waited as a lost person, ignored the invitations, ignored all the pleas, waited till after you died and then you waked up in the lake of fire thinking, oh, why could I have sat there? Why could I have kicked the can down the road? Why did I wait? With no hope. If these are you, I'm asking you today to make the change. do something about where you are. You don't have to stay there. The God of Heaven is a wonderful, merciful, forgiving God. And when people come in their hearts broken at the end of self and come saying, here I am, just as I am, God I'm coming to you to give me eternal life. I'm coming to you to help me to get up and serve you. I'm coming Lord. He will help. I'm going to ask you to stand. We're going to sing an invitation today. If you need to come, if God has spoken to you through His word and it is the mirror, you know, the Bible mirror that you see, if you've seen you and you say I need to respond to this invitation, I'm going to ask you to come. Father, I appreciate this opportunity to stand here and talk about your Bible mirror, the Word of God, which is such a of who we are, where we are, where we're going. But at the same time is such a source of help, medicine for the soul, direction for our paths to keep us on the right and straight and narrow and to get us back on it when we're off. And Lord, to know that you're there, the God of heaven, who doesn't throw us away, but who's ready to receive us. Like the father of the prodigal ran and met him and wept upon him. Oh God, I pray today that if people in this room need to come to this invitation, they'd do it. Let's take care of business. We know we should. I ask in Jesus' name, amen.